Prostate & Breast Cancer

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Prostate & Breast Cancer

Just read this on the web and thought, this guy makes a good point. As I am overdue for a check-up it got me to thinking that equal rights,benefits, importance, between the sexes may have been overbalanced. Just a thought, anyone else?

ron

News
06:22:2007:15:52
Quentin Johnson - Gland Equity
I may be totally wrong about this, but it seems like men care more about women's breasts than women care about men's prostates.

Let's go back about a year ago, when I happened to stumble on a professional lacrosse All-Star game on TV. The players were all wearing pink helmets (if you know anything at all about lacrosse you now know that the players were men). I soon learned that the game was a fundraising event for the fight against breast cancer.

Wow, I thought to myself, what a wonderful, magnanimous, sensitive thing for a bunch of male athletes to do.

Then, last Mothers' Day weekend, Major League Baseball took its turn at the plate, with players swinging pink bats to promote breast cancer awareness. Another great idea, and a fantastic tribute to Moms everywhere.

But wait a second. Men get sick too, don't they? Prostate cancer killed an estimated 27,000 men in the U.S. last year. That figure falls about 30 percent short of all the people, men and women, who died of breast cancer, but let's not quibble over the numbers. Why aren't NBA players, for example, bouncing baby-blue basketballs to draw attention to a disease that most men will inevitably get if they live long enough? Breast cancer awareness efforts are light years ahead of those for prostate cancer, and there has to be a reason why.

Granted, men aren't as organized as women when it comes to drawing attention to their peculiar afflictions. Pass the hat during a sports event and most guys will drop in some change. But the idea of men marching in the streets or sponsoring big standalone events to battle prostate cancer seems kind of odd. We read in the news about famous men having prostate surgery, but there are no distaff Betty Rollinses or Linda Ellerbees to drive home the point. The best our team can muster is largely-forgotten '80s junk-bond king Michael Milken. One man throwing his own personal fortune at the problem is admirable, but it isn't enough.

There's also a misconception out there that men simply don't care. Case in point - that TV ad where a woman says "some things, men don't like to talk about," to which her male partner chimes in like a ventriloquist's dummy, "Yeah, like prostate health." Heck, I could blurt out a 20-year history of my prostate - PSA test results, digital exam horror stories, and why I think green tea and exercise may have shrunk my slightly-enlarged prostate, if anybody ever bothered to ask me. It's OK for women to confide in each other about lumps, bumps and Pap smears. But men? Forget about it.

Furthermore, a lot of men, myself included, believed that if we just ate enough ketchup and tomato sauce all our prostate problems would be over. New research discounting the benefits of the red food pigment lycopene sent us all back to the drawing board.

Just last week, I finally, FINALLY saw something that gave me hope that men's diseases are considered important, too. At a supermarket not far from where I work, at the end of each checkout line, sits one of those big blue water jugs to collect donations for prostate cancer research. None of the bottles held enough coinage to even cover their bottoms, but hey, it's a start.

I now gladly pop a dollar bill in the jug every time I go. But here's something that took the wind out of my sails - a cashier asked a woman if she'd like to make a donation. "No," she replied, pointing to her male companion, "if HE wants to he can do it with HIS money."

Maybe if men's prostates were more conspicuously located, prostate cancer awareness would be sexier.

Breast cancer has been replaced by lung cancer as the most prevalent cancer in women…and no one knows why. Researchers do know it has nothing to do with smoking.

And then there is colon cancer; more prevalent in women than in men. One out of every 6 people in America one will develop colon cancer at some point in their life. It is a simple cancer to treat, is usually successful/curable if caught in the early stage. But so many people will not do the screening for it. By the time a person show symptoms of colon cancer the disease is well beyond the early stages.

Eyeball - 6/23/2007 4:07 PM
And then there is colon cancer; more prevalent in women than in men. One out of every 6 people in America one will develop colon cancer at some point in their life. It is a simple cancer to treat, is usually successful/curable if caught in the early stage. But so many people will not do the screening for it. By the time a person show symptoms of colon cancer the disease is well beyond the early stages.

Indeed. A colonoscopy is painless but awkward, and generally needs to be done every 5 or 6 years or so. The worst part is giving yourself a Fleet in preparation. I had put mine off until a friend was discovered with stage 4 colon cancer and died shortly after. That chased me in. I'm 68, and would like to live a few more years at least. He!!, I stopped smoking in 1976, and THAT was tougher.

I did a baseline partial at 45. I am 50 this year and will be going in for my mandatory executive physical at the Mayo in September. This time they will do a full.

The self-delivered enema 5 years ago was worse than lying on my side and watching the film of the colonscopy as it happened! Instructions were to squirt from the bottle, hold it 2 minutes and then go to the bathroom, I think my squirt and sqaut were near simultaneous!

No more Fleets enemas required.
To prep for my colonoscopy earlier this year all I had to do was drink a couple of 8 oz bottles of Fleet® Phospho-soda® Oral Saline Laxative, and that took care of everything

Yep, that stuff that I drank damn near killed me. I had heard that it was vile stuff so twenty minutes after drinking it I told my wife that it was nothin'; it didn't affect me. Ha, ten minutes later it was coming outta both ends faster than I thought possible. I was laying on the bathroom floor praying for death. Next day the Doc says, "how was it last night, some folks have a small problem with that stuff".

I don’t know what they are doing to you guys down there in FLA but my doc wrote out a script for a colonoscopy prep kit that I got from the pharmacist. It’s a plastic bottle, a pill, and some powder. There is some fasting involved. The evening before you take the pill and mix the powder with water in the plastic bottle, then drink 8oz every 15-mins until its all gone. The doc said I would want to stay near some porcelain. He was right. About 30-mins after starting the fluid I was on the pot every 10-mins or so. After the next day’s colonoscopy the doc said I was squeaky clean inside, no problems seeing all areas in my colon.